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Actually, our anniversary Valentine's Day, but I wanted to share this recipe with you guys tonight. :) Three years ago, Luke flew up to Chicago to ask me to be his girlfriend. After what seemed like an eternity of 4 months, I packed up my big city life to be with Luke and be closer to family in Florida. We met almost 10 years ago (wow!), back in college and were in the same graphic design program, but never dated. We rekindled our friendship throughout the years, checking up on each other to see how one another was doing….but not much more than that. I’m so thankful we got together after all this time. It’s a long story that I’ll have to save for another post, but we’ve been together ever since he came up to see me during a terrible blizzard in the middle of February in Chicago.

I made this rosemary garlic bread over the weekend for a pre-valentine’s day celebration. Being that we’re busy and saving for this whole wedding thing, we decided to skip the over-hyped Valentine’s day dinner, go for a 3-mile run to celebrate our 3 year anniversary, and have some good food at home.

This bread recipe is by far, our favorite bread recipe. Spend the couple of extra dollars and get the bread flour - it makes the bread extra squishy and delicious. Happy Valentine’s day!

Ingredients

3 1/2 cups bread flour

1 cup bread flour set aside

1/4 cup olive oil

1 packet active yeast (2 1/4 tsp)

1 1/2 cups room temp water

1/4 cup chopped fresh rosemary

3 - 6 cloves minced garlic

1 tsp salt

2 tsp kosher salt

1 tbsp sugar

Directions:

In bowl, mix the water, yeast, sugar and half of rosemary. In separate bowl, add 1 tsp salt to flour, mix, then add flour to yeast mix, slowly, until dough is able to form ball. Knead on floured board for 10 mins. Sprinkle on the flour that was set aside to the dough ball and floured surface to keep from sticking.

Place dough in oiled bowl, cover, let sit in warm place until doubled in size (about 1 hour). Mix oil, rosemary and garlic.

Punch dough down, knead a few times to make easy to handle. Shape dough into 2 loaves, place several inches apart on baking sheet. Score loaves, pour oil mix on top. Sprinkle each loaf with kosher salt. Preheat oven to 350. Allow to rise for 30 minutes.

Wowza! These last couple of weeks have been crazy at work. We’re working on recipe videos for a client and have been experimenting with some food typography or words made out of food.

I’ve always been into hand lettering, but mostly just saw it as a doodling hobby. Over the last week or so, I’ve been creating food puns out of some fun ingredients. Check ‘em out here:

As you can see we’ve been a little busy, so making big batches of soup has been a life-saver after working a 10+ hour day. This lentil potato leek soup was particularly great with a bowl of brown rice on the side. You can even take it to work the next day and not stink up the break room. Ha! Well, I can’t to move forward with this food typography stuff and share our experiments with you in the future.

Lentil Potato Leek Soup

Ingredients:

2 tbsp olive oil

1 cup green lentils

1 large leek, white part only, thinly sliced

1 large potato, cut into 1/4 inch small cubes

3 carrots roughly sliced

3 celery stalks roughly sliced

2-3 tbsp Italian spices of your choice (I used rosemary and oregano)

1/2 tsp salt

1/2 tsp black pepper

2 garlic cloves, minced

1 can unsalted crushed tomatoes

4 cups dinosaur kale (the darker green flat kind) thinly sliced

6 cups low-sodium or homemade vegetable broth

1-2 cups water

Directions:

In a large soup pot, heat olive oil over medium-high heat. Add leeks, celery, and carrots. Cook for 4-5 minutes, until vegetables start to give off some water.

Add garlic. Cook for 30 seconds.

Add potatoes, Italian spices, salt/pepper, crushed tomatoes, lentils, vegetable broth and water. Stir to combine. Bring to a boil. Turn down heat to medium-low and let cook for 25-30 minutes or until lentils are softened.

Luke and I officially set a date for our wedding! December 23rd, 2017. It’s going to be an small, intimate wedding with close family and friends at his parent’s house in good ol’ Seminole, FL.

Although we’re cutting a huge cost from not booking at a venue, we’re still paying for the wedding out of our own pockets, so I have a feeling this next year will be one of budget-friendly healthy recipes. Who doesn’t want to save a little while still eating delicious, healthy food. :)

I know there have been a lot of soup/stew recipes up here lately, but we’re taking full advantage of the weather being somewhat cool down here in Florida and being able to enjoy these types of foods. Today we’ve got simple carrot coconut soup that I threw together in all of 20 minutes. No joke! This is a very easy and light dish to put together.

This recipe is also jam-packed full of the flu-fighting foods like ginger and turmeric to keep you healthy from whatever has been going around the office. For a little extra substance, I would probably serve this with a salad on the side or maybe some steamed rice. I’m sure red lentils would be an excellent addition as well!

Carrot Ginger Coconut Soup

Ingredients:

1 tbsp coconut oil

10-12 carrots, peeled and roughly chopped

2 pieces of celery, roughly chopped

2 cups low-sodium vegetable stock

2-3 cups water

2 inches of ginger, peeled roughly chopped

1 in fresh turmeric, peeled

1 tsp cumin

1/2 tsp salt

1/2 tsp pepper

Juice from 2 oranges

1 can of coconut milk

Unsweetened shredded coconut (optional for garnish)

Directions:

In a large soup pot, heat coconut oil over medium-high heat. When melted, add carrots and celery. Cook for 4-5 minutes or until celery starts to turn a brighter green.

As the holidays have come and gone, we’ve been feeling the need to purge some of the toxins acquired over the last couple of months. Weeks of parties and family get togethers have left us dehydrated and in desperate need of some vitamins. Dry out January, am I right? After all the slow cooked, roasted, decadent foods of the holiday season we’re both craving raw fruits, vegetables, and lots of light foods - in particular of the green hues. Green smoothies, loads of green salads, and green soups have made their way into our weekly menus since national hangover day, or January 1st for those who don’t drink.

While raw veggies are great for breakfast and lunch, we’re usually craving something warm and comforting at the end of the work day. Temperatures have dropped to a bone-chilling 60 degrees, putting us in the mood for some soup. One of our favorite soups, pre-vegan, was mexican chicken pozole from basically any Mexican restaurant found in Chicago. For the non-vegans out there, this was the cure all for any hangover, flu, or just plain bad day you might be having. Our version is a bit of a departure from the tried and true pozole found in Chicago, but it’s comforting and will just make you feel better. Loaded with cilantro, lime, homemade veggie broth, hominy, then topped with radishes, red onion and cilantro, this fancy pants looking soup is ready in just 30-minutes. The vegetables are roasted to a slight char on the edges, which adds to the depth of flavor and deliciousness in the soup. Don’t skip this part! Serve this with tortillas, or maybe even a side of brown rice to beef it up a bit.

Happy New Year everyone! Luke and I have had an incredible week of holiday family time, working from home, and enjoying some beautiful Florida weather. While most of social media is complaining about how much 2016, for lack of a better term, sucked, I'll have to admit 2016 was an incredible year for us.

Here are some of our highlights:

First and foremost, we got engaged! We've set a date for Dec. 23, 2017.

We had not 1, but 2 family members kick cancer's ass. Suck it, cancer!

Luke became an art director.

We ran 2 marathons and 2 half marathons – one of which was a PR for Sam.

We moved to downtown St. Petersburg, FL and into a sweet apartment.

And after losing our entire first blog, we rebranded ourselves into this blog, Kale Yeah, It's Vegan.

After all these amazing things that happened in 2016, we've got a few things we want to accomplish in 2017.

Here are some of my (Sam's) 2017 goals:

Get married, duh!

Continue to learn and grow with web design. I've been doing this by learning a program called Web Flow and participating in a daily user interface design challenge. You can check that out here: http://samanthawilley.com/new-page/

Complete Code School courses in HTML/CSS and Javascript. Gettin' with the times, am I right?

Read 12 books. Got a head start with Selling the Invisible and Food Writing Volume 16

Run more and lift weights. As runners, we often neglect strength training to get faster.

Continue blogging at least 1 time a week.

Let Luke know how much I love him everyday. (Aw!)

And many more, but you guys get the idea.

Let us know your 2017 goals!

Here are some polaroids of some our favorite moments in 2016. We love our family and friends so much! Thank you for an incredible year!

Hello! We're Sam and Luke, the couple behind Kale Yeah, It’s Vegan. This blog was created to help others along their journey towards wellness by showing how amazing and easy to prepare plant-based recipes can be.